The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Many websites, such as news sites, blogs, and social networking sites, commonly present users with various forms of content displayed in association with one or more images. For example, a celebrity news website may include webpages that display news articles and related images about various celebrities; a social networking website may include webpages with user-generated content including images posted by users of the social networking site.
Operators of websites such as those described above may often desire to monetize the webpages of a website. One way that webpages may be monetized is by displaying advertisements in conjunction with the webpage content. In order to increase the likelihood that users viewing a particular webpage may be interested in displayed advertisements, website operators and/or advertisers may attempt to present advertisements that are relevant to the webpage content. For example, an operator of a celebrity news site may desire that advertisements relevant to the celebrity news content be displayed to users.
For websites that include images as part of webpage content, one way to display relevant advertisements may be to display advertisements that are relevant to the content of the images. However, a representation of an image's content for the purposes of searching for relevant advertisements may not be readily available based on the image data alone. One approach for determining the content of images for the purpose of selecting relevant advertisements is to use human labelers to manually identify elements depicted in an image and to select advertisements based on the identified elements. However, the human labeling of image content and the manual selection of relevant advertisements is both time and labor intensive and does not scale efficiently as the number of images to be processed increases.